Personal tools

Tailoring tools for type designers

Philipp Acsany, Benedikt Bramböck
ATypI 2016 • Warsaw, Poland
NiNA

Many type designers, from beginners to experts, find it a daunting and confusing experience when their know-how fails them while attempting to optimize the technical quality of their designs. Hence, we would like to walk through some examples that showcase our latest testing environment developed under the direction of Andreas Eigendorf dedicated to seamless font production workflows. Our “Alphabet Database”, maintained and tailored for both type designers and foundries, is just one of our continuously growing family of tools which helps define custom character sets, extend language coverage and analyze existing fonts. Furthermore, this framework extends to multiple tools, some of them being available as online resources or apps, others being plugins, macros and extensions available for use within any font editor of choice. This suite will eventually provide designers with a highly resourceful hub, whilst eliminating those moments when the creative process gets interrupted or stuck simply because essential technical requirements need to be researched, checked, fixed and improved. Ultimately, collaboration between designers, foundries and engineers can therefore be greatly enhanced. Keywords: font engineering, font production, web-based tools, font testing suites, type design workflow, quality assurance, language, character sets, plugins, extensions, macros, online resources, python